Things I like about living in Russia: A List in No Particular Order

• Once I've gotten past their serious-faced rarely-smiling exteriors, I've found the Russians I know to be some of the most earnestly friendly people I've ever met. I love my Russian friends.
• The enormous forests of tower blocks that comprise this city make me perpetually feel like I'm walking around on the bottom of the ocean.
• People park anywhere. Literally anywhere. As long as you leave your phone number on your dash you seem to be able to block in as many other cars as you need too. On the sidewalk no less.
• The way people are so often shocked and even oddly grateful that a foreigner from such an exotic place as America (where so much pop culture comes from) not only lives here but is actually interested in everything Russian and LIKES it here. It makes me happy to be able to show half the people I meet that all Americans are not terrible people, and the other half the people I meet that some Americans actually know about and care about Russia.
• Russians applaud in a rhythm after some performances. It really confused me at first. And when a slow song comes on, even at a club, couples often partner dance like twelve-year-olds at a middle school prom. 
• Not understanding what most of the people around me are saying, most of the time. It's actually kind of a relief not having to listen to everyone else's inanities--with that distraction gone I can much more easily listen to my own internal inanities. On the other hand...
• Trying to learn Russian is super fun. It gives me an enormous sense of accomplishment when I splutter through an entire conversation with a taxi driver or stranger, or actually manage to read and understand an entire poster.
• The fact that it's more or less just like living anywhere else, which is relieving in an interesting sense: yes, humans basically are the same everywhere. Not, actually, that surprising. 
• Riding the metro every day. It's dirty and loud, though the stations are extravaganzas of marble and chandeliers and Soviet art. Honestly I think the reason it doesn't get old is that I spent so much of my life in a tiny cornfield town that it's still pretty damn exciting to get on a train.
• Ice skating is a serious thing here. My favorite park now has a rink that's not even just a big space, it is almost trail-like areas that take you to little coffee huts where you can stop and have tea or mulled wine. 
• They have hedgehogs here. Yeah, that's right. HEDGEHOGS.

racism and homophobia. yes, they exist here.

People from home tend to ask: “But isn’t Russia super racist and homophobic? How can you want to live there?”

            And my answer is yes: yes Russia is racist, yes Russia is homophobic, at least to a greater extent than that to which I am accustomed. 

           There are the boys sniggering the “n word” over pictures in our textbooks. There is the boy saying Freddie Mercury died because he was gay. There is one of the summer camp directors banning a group of kids from using Conchita Wurst as their group’s celebrity. There are the two girls in my class reading their speech on immigration in their country: “we have many immigrants, Tajiks, Uzbeks, etc, they are very bad, they look at our women, they rape our women, 80% of crime is these foreigner. Russia would be better with one nationality.” There’s our security guard constantly questioning the presence of our Asian-British teacher. There's the cab company whose mobile app lets you call a "Slavic" driver.

            And to be honest, when I'm not in the mood for eliciting looks of shock and horror I generally tell random strangers that I'm from London. Though when I do cop to California or Florida or general America, after the initial shocked splutter about Obama, sometimes I can find some common ground or at least manage to talk a bit with the stranger, and I like to think that the person might go on to tell other people that today they met an American who was actually a pretty decent human being.

            And for each of these less than pleasant encounters there are an equal number that go: American! You’re American! It is my dream to go to California/Miami/live in New York. It is beautiful? I love America/Americans.

            And despite the overheard homophobic comments there’s also the occasional piece of writing by a student that says: “Conchita Wurst is the coolest, I don’t care if he/she’s a man or a women he/she’s my hero”. There’s the late night conversation with a camp counselor about how the gay night at a club is one of her favorite nights out, that it seems to her there isn’t actually anything wrong with gay people, that they are, in fact, great and should be able to be married or do anything else they want. There’s the fact that the group of kids voted for Conchita as their celebrity symbol in the first place.

            And for every cringingly racist comment that gets flung about in class there is often a counter viewpoint, such as emphatic responses of: “No, no! I don’t agree! Different cultures have good things, we can learn from different peoples. People shouldn’t come to Russia and be bad, but people are good too,” etc. Or I might have a discussion in which I point out that children of gay parents not knowing that they don’t have to be gay too is not one of the arguments that can rationally be used against gay parenting (unless said gay parents are planning to raise their child in a closet, and no one is arguing that that isn’t a bad policy). There is definitely room for dialogue on many occasions.

            And then of course, in spite of it all, there’s the pair of young men scantly-clad in short shorts in the shop, clinging to each other’s necks and giggling, who a dour looking middle-aged man has a perfectly civil conversation with over the frozen fish. Sometimes there’s a lesbian couple, or a mixed race couple, in the park with a baby stroller.  Sure these incidents are vastly fewer and further between than they would be in London, New York or San Francisco, but some of Moscow, at least, is trying.

            Yes Russia has a long way to go, and yes Russia is taking steps back as well as forward, but let’s keep supporting the people here who want more tolerance. And please, let’s keep showing ourselves and the rest of the world what it looks like when people allow more and more equality, in whatever corner of the world we might find ourselves.

Russian Summer Camp

The English language camp I taught at this summer was held in what seemed, from an outsider's perspective, to be an utterly bizarre venue for any kind of retreat/resort/children's camp. I believe it was a private country estate, at one time, but had been purchased and decked out with some brand-new swanky hotel buildings.

 
The odd thing was, instead of removing the old farmhouse and its cluster of outbuildings, all of these were left in various states of cardboard-windowed graffiti-walled decay, with the new buildings simply plopped down here and there among them.

Additionally, the footpaths were left to lie as they fell, meaning roads to nowhere (that nevertheless must be used, as the only connections between said brand-new fancy buildings).

The sidewalk "connecting" the dorm building with  the classrooms

The large recently-built gym was reached not through the manicured front landscaping (you can see the flowers around to the left) but via an easy-to-miss trail that led around the back.

The front

The trail around to the door

The view from the back/front door

The doors to the classrooms sometimes locked from the inside trapping a whole class of kids, or the doors to their bathrooms would lock, trapping a kid in the loo for a couple of hours, until someone eventually came to break out the unlucky child or class of wild monkeys. After seeing how well the lock worked on my own hotel-style room I was hardly surprised.

The creative signage left a lot to the imagination...

But best of all, when walking around the sparse woods dotted with buildings new and old and connected by a maze of half-paths, there was the occasional broken window and DayGlo reminder of just where you were:

 

How to Make a Breakfast Burrito out of Russian Blanket Bread

My housemate holding the blanket bread...

And burrito!

Celebrating Moscow's Birthday

The Day of the City, Moscow’s 867^th birthday party, is warm and clear. Though, I am told, one shouldn’t be surprised at this; the clouds are seeded to insure that every such holiday has ideal weather. It was certainly true on Victory Day, the day after my arrival.

I find myself in the center, watching the military orchestra parade wind down Tverskaya Ulitsa.

 For me the Irish bagpipers are the most stirring, though the impeccably-timed, white-robed Chinese martial artists are undeniably impressive, and something about the slow, almost funereal music of the Swiss army seems to indicate a view that war is something somber and possibly atrocious, rather than a gay rah-rah event. The Mexican contribution is more along the lines of a mariachi band complete with full, colorful-skirted dancers, even the more militaristic types wearing a sort of sombrero. One has to imagine the Mexicans just not quite conceiving of participating in a parade in any other mode than fiesta, and the on-looking Russian authorities muttering to one another: “Gospodi! What are they doing? Didn’t they get the memo?”

There are crowds of people to stroll through, everywhere things to look at and free things to pick up like balloons and red paper crowns cut like St. Basil’s. While watching the parade I go for a coffee and deep-fried fabulously fattening doughnut item, sending my Russian companion into hysterics over accidentally ending up with a battery-juice double espresso instead of a cappuccino or an Americano. I followed the conversation as far as them not having cappuccinos or, apparently, any cream for an Americano, but must have missed her saying there was no water either, and would a double espresso do?

“You shouldn’t nod your head if you don’t know what they are saying, people think you understand,” my companion tells me sagely and I quite agree, though secretly make no resolve whatsoever: for the most part general nodding is the only way forward.

Later in the day we make our way to a couchsurfing event that’s a pleasant mix of chatting in English, listening to a live band, and drinking happy hour beer. At one point I get involved in a not-entirely-unfamiliar conversation that starts with some racial slurs, which almost inevitably leads to someone making an analogy with African Americans in America, which, as today, often leads me into a rather vociferous (though hopefully good-natured) treatise on how I see race and poverty/opportunity/socioeconomic status as different things, sometimes linked though not necessarily causal, and what, in my opinion, leads to crime or in other ways objectionable lifestyles. The discussion also has the not unpleasant (and also not-unfamiliar) result of people coming up to assure me that ‘really, not all Russians are racist’. And, I’m happy to say, they absolutely are not.

Finally a largish group of between 15 and 20 people set off for a house party at the distant end of the red line, a wobbly commute involving a failed attempt to buy alcohol, a fabulous view of fireworks over the river from the momentarily surfaced metro, and lots of laughter as things are translated between Russian, English and French. At the bottom of the red line our unofficial group leader pauses the group in front of a MacDonald’s, asking “Who needs a piss?” in the group’s three languages. A couple of hours after setting out we arrive at last at the apartment high-rise, one in a circle of blue, yellow and red lit monoliths that make you feel that you’ve just swum into some deep-sea cave, or that you are looking down at the world instead of up, perhaps from an airplane window at night.

We hear the laughter of the party before we see the policemen heading into the building. We pause uncertainly; a couple members of the group approach the policemen to see if they are going to break up our party. The, rather improbable, conclusion of our guide is that they are going to another party in the same building, also hosted by an American. The rest of us look at one another askance but hang about. At last someone decides to send us into the building in waves of three or four, for stealthy party-entering purposes, but as my group reaches the door group 1 comes back down with group 2 in tow, saying that the police are, indeed, in the flat.

So that’s that, and after a rather long metro ride I find myself back at my own flat in time for a late-night grilled cheese. A holiday well spent.

Operation Iraqi Freedom

Ended up at a pizza party one day that was unexpectedly posh, and turned out to be hosted by someone who works at the American embassy. Suddenly realized what I was drinking vodka out of...

The Time Douche

Correcting a student group's story I come across the line, all on its own, "time douche".

"Time douche?" I said, "What does this mean?"

They didn't seem able to explain in English.

"Are you trying to say dush, like in Russian? Shower?" I asked, trying to mime a shower. They looked confused, obviously this not what they'd meant.

It transpired that they'd translated something, and they translated it again for me. Sure enough, the translator said "time douche".

"Sorry guys, I have absolutely no idea what this means..."

***

 My friends, however, had some potential definitions: 

• A cleansing moment in one's history that also has an awkward private aspect that you don't want to share. Like eating a whole tub of ice cream when heartbroken. A time douche. 

  -Bernie

  
  
• Time douche: one who travels through time to trip skipping children, fart on people's heads while they sleep, and wake babies.

  -KvK

   
• Maybe it's literally a new kind of douche that takes your vagina back in time. 

  -Jane

  (Like I just don't have time to shave! I'll just use a time douche set on 11. -KvK)

   
• Maybe it's an herbal thing, like a thyme douche.

  -Veg

Russian Children on Alaska

In class, playing Jeopardy, geography for 75 points:
Me: The biggest state in the USA.
Team 1 (discusses for a long time): California!
Me: Good guess, but not quite. Team 2?
Team 2 (equally long discussion): New Jersey!
Me: Um... No.
Team 1: Florida?
Me: Good guess! Team 2?
Team 2 (another long discussion): Philadelphia?
Me: Lol.
Team 1 (thinks hard): Texas?
Me: Very good guess! But still no.
Team 2 (discusses): Okay, okay we know! Dallas!
Me: Well that's a city in Texas, um, good try, the answer is Alaska.
Half the class: Alaska?! Alaska is Russia!!!

Soup du Jour: Caviar Surprise